One thing that's a bit curious though is how the rewards, or lack thereof, for the different difficulty options have been implemented. As was the case with Project 8, Tony Hawk's Proving Ground has three levels of difficulty for each challenge - Am (for amateur), Pro and Sick. A competition might require 50,000 points for earning an Am ranking, 150,000 for Pro and 800,000 for Sick, for example. You'll clear the challenge for finishing it on Am, so progression isn't affected by getting better rankings. You also earn the same amount of ability upgrade points for getting Am as you do for Sick, so there's no difference there. The only benefits you get for finishing a goal on Pro or Sick are bragging rights and a little more money, which is only good for buying new clothes and outfitting your Skate Lounge.

The Skate Lounge is one of the new highlights to this installment, but its value is honestly very small. As you work through the game you'll unlock new parts and more money to buy said parts, which you can place anywhere in your Skate Lounge. Think of it as a permanent Create-a-Park that you can cater to your style. While it's cool that it exists, we only ever messed around with the Skate Lounge enough to try out the building tools, and didn't see the long-term benefits of spending an hour or two customizing our warehouse.

The world of Proving Ground is a bit of a hit-or-miss with regards to layout. There's plenty to do and lots of nice spots to hit, though it can feel a little too crowded at times. Our problem though is that each of the three cities in the game is connected by a bridge and possibly an underground transit tunnel. Because of this, when moving from one to another you need to find the correct street to take to get there instead of just going in the general direction that the goal arrow tells you to go. It would have been much more helpful if the arrow actually told you how to get there instead of pointing in some general direction that you can't directly travel to.

Another issue here is that the transit system of the past handful of games is gone. You need to manually (get it?) skate from goal to goal, and some of the multi-part goals are spread out all over the world.

You can teach an old dog new tricks, but the old tricks will still be old.

One of the new features that had the potential to be awesome is the video editor. The editor itself is extremely robust, though the menu navigation can be a little wonky until you get used to it. You're able to drop in transitions, add effects and even combine separate saved clips into one video. All of this is great. However, instead of the game keeping a constantly-recorded replay of your recent happenings, you have to manually start the recording every time you want to make a clip. This means that if you just accidentally got hit by a car and flung into the ocean, it's not on video. Also, you can't get being hit bar a car and getting flung into the ocean on video because when you start recording the game removes all pedestrians and vehicles from the area. Weak sauce.

The Verdict

Tony Hawk's Proving Ground is a relatively solid game, but it really doesn't do anything new and significant. We've seen all of the good parts from the game multiple, multiple times now, and it really just feels like we're playing a large expansion pack. That doesn't mean that it's not fun, but it does mean that it's rather old hat.